Preregistration for Gender Equity and Effectiveness, Efficiency and Equity Tradeoffs in Public Programs

This is an extension of “Effectiveness, Efficiency and Equity Tradeoffs in Public Programs: A Citizen Experiment” that was pre-registered on this site on June 26, 2020. Public programs often have multiple goals (Chun and Rainey 2005), multiple stakeholders with different goals (Boyne 2002), or heterogeneous impacts across different population groups; all three of these factors suggest that public programs involve a tradeoff in values (Frederickson 2015; Okun 1975). This survey experiment seeks to determine how the public values effectiveness, efficiency, and equity when faced with tradeoffs among these values using a vignette study of public education. The experiment is a 3 x 3 x 3 factor design using a hypothetical public school district. 1600 MTurk respondents will be used. The AU IRB has approved the experiment. All respondents will be told that the statewide average for all school districts is an overall pass rate of 80% for both male and female students and per student expenditures of $9950. The experiment will be fielded in late June 2021.